Markets Hit New Highs as AI Boom and Strong Jobs Data Fuel Investor Optimism

Let's get Michael Monaghan's take on today's tape and much more.

He joins us now, portfolio manager, founder at 100 ETF.

It's great to see you.

Great to see you.

Thanks for having us.

First, very broad strokes.

I'm going to let you take this wherever you want.

You get a look at the big board here.

We started in negative territory.

That did not last long.

By side pressure came in, another round of all-time highs.

What do you see in these markets?

So we see 3 waves moving through the market.

Market.

You have the macro with the Mideast instability.

You have the Capex buildout with AI, and you have the job concerns.

So you see those three waves moving through the market.

And right now the concerns on Middle East instability and job losses seem to have abated.

We saw the great job numbers last week.

So what we're seeing is the follow through for the Capex spend cycle.

When you talk about a bull.

Overall, you like to see your generals lead.

You like to see big tech do very well.

What do you see in terms of breadth rotation?

Are there other non-tech parts of the market that are giving you some optimism that they're also doing their fair share?

Yes, we're seeing strength across many sectors of the market.

We're invested broadly across all parts of the economy, and we see strength across all of our names that we're currently invested in.

We got a high stakes meeting this week on the geopolitics front.

Peter Tuchman and I were just talking about how the concerns in Iran have been somewhat abated from investors, but now you've got this can't miss meeting between US President Donald Trump and Xi Jinping of China.

What are you watching for out of those geopolitical developments and things investors may pay attention to this week?

So we tend to take a very long-term view and try not to get bogged down by any one data point.

We like to look at the mosaic of the way the market's moving.

We think that's an important meeting, but we don't think it's the only story of the market.

What is that mosaic?

How would you describe the fabric of that mosaic to a would-be market participant right now?

So I think as we mentioned before, we bring in a data point like that meeting in China and also what's going on with oil prices and inflation and compare that to the backdrop of these big, big buildouts within the AICE spending cycle and then.

Also incorporate what's going on with jobs.

So that's what we're watching within our mosaic.

Do you have concerns about the capex super cycle, the spending cycle, the hyper scales right now?

There's some concerns that maybe the valuations become a little bit more too stretched.

Are they a little too far over their skis?

How are you thinking about that question?

So we don't see that.

We look at the payback cycles on some of this cap ex spend right now.

It looks like a big data center has a 2 to 3 year payback.

So we think those are very strong investments.

And we don't think these stocks are expensive.

You look at Meta, it's trading at a 0.6 peg right now.

So we think there's good valuation opportunities in a lot of these hyper scales.

Let me ask you about the Founder Factor ETF.

This was really interesting.

My producers and I were looking at this today.

It's ticker symbol FFF.

Among your top holdings, Oracle, Nvidia, Palantir Meta, Salesforce.

I'm recognizing a pattern here.

What should people know about the ETF and the companies who qualify?

So in the Founders 100 ETF.

We own the 100 best publicly traded founder-led companies.

The reason we focus on founders, if you look at founders over very long periods of time, those stocks tend to have 3 times the stock performance of a board hired CEO.

So we think it's a very efficacious way for us to invest on behalf of our investors to deliver the best possible risk adjusted returns.

Before I let you go, any other top catalysts on your radar you are paying attention to that you think the average?

Would-be investor at home might also benefit from paying closer attention to.

So we're very long term.

We encourage investors to think in long, long investment cycles and allow the power of compounding to help them with their investments.

Focus on the long term and don't get bogged down on the short term data points.

It's time in the markets, not time in the markets.

I'm sure you've heard that before.

Absolutely right, we agree.

You're welcome back anytime.

Michael Monaghan, portfolio manager, founder of 100 ETF.

Thanks a lot for being here.

It's great to have you.

Thanks for having us.